When I was eighteen, I already owned a beautiful 1964 Triumph Bonneville — but like so many guys, I was caught up in the idea of building a chopper and being a bad-boy Harley owner. I'd ride the Triumph down to Fullerton Harley just to drool at their bikes. On one visit I spotted new inventory on the floor: a 1957 hardtail, wishbone frame, springer front end. We started dealing, and I walked out having paid the full asking price — $500.
Now I just had to get it home and chop it. Like most people with grand plans for a new project, that's about as far as mine got for a while. I did ride it some, even took a road trip up to Oregon on it. I gave the Triumph to my girlfriend, so the Harley became my only ride, shared occasionally with my Chevelle. I rode it to work every day just because it was fun, and cool, old-school.
One day at lunch I was riding it to Taco Tio. Crossing the I-5 overpass, I was just leaning into the left-hander on the downhill side when I hit an oil spill — had to be a quart's worth, at least. Cars leaked a lot back then, but I'd never seen anything like this. Both wheels lost the asphalt mid-lean, and I went down on my left side, sliding at thirty-five miles an hour.
Twenty, maybe thirty yards, before I hit the curb on the far side of the road.
It took a while to get the bike upright, and then I saw the damage: both turn signals gone off the left side, the mousetrap broken (the contraption that actuated the clutch back then), and the clutch hand lever sacrificed in the process. Didn't stop me from getting my lunch — just took some creative rigging to get the bike back to work, and home again after.
That little crash was all the motivation it took to start the chopper project — that, and the fact that fixing the Triumph was going to cost more than I'd paid for it in the first place. I spent nine months building the girl.